This is the second in the series of the single the single bucket challenge. I have a long term goal of creating ten of these over the next few years. My first piece like this was a simple pattern, and I was thinking the whole time that the houndstooth pattern looked an awful lot like the ships from Space Invaders, and was inspired.

I worked out most of the design from a screenshot found online of the ships in formation, added the Mystery Ship looming large in the background, plotted out the curve of the “Earth” and continents (not to scale). The big challenge here was to use all the colors while creating a design spontaneously.

It took about 25 hours to sort the beads, 30 to lay out the design, and 3 to tape and iron.

Gotta poke those holes to help the ironing process (important for bigger pieces like this)

Two sheets of Reynolds Parchment paper covered it nicely. Getting read for a long ironing session. It’s stressful as all getout, and I have to switch up arms. Big stack of books on the ready. Yes I have a functional candy machine in my house.I buy these books half off at Goodwill. No I didn’t read the Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh books. =)

Closeup of the finished surface. I only iron the one side, and I display the bead side.

New big project in the works. Gotta finish this up in the next 3 days. I separated an entire bucket again and the plan is to make one single piece with it. (Like I did with this)

I’ve laid out the Invaders, shields and laser cannon from the 1978 game Space Invaders, and was planning on what I would do to fill things in, and haven’t made a final decision, but I am going to get back to work on it now.

It’s been over a month since I have updated the blog here, and for good reason. This monstrosity is the result of taking a full bucket of 22k beads, separating them, and then making one single piece. There were 22,172 beads in total.

Here is the completed art. I wanted to make something with a simple repeating pattern that would be easy to put together, and Houndstooth is one of my favorite tessellating patterns. (shout out to whomever added Ricky from Trailer Park Boys to the Wikipedia entry).

I started by ordering the colors in ROYGBIV, and then alternating dark and light colors. I think I could have come up with a better color arrangement, but I didn’t want to pain over what the final finished product would be, but simply wanted to get it done.

Here are a few of the single boards I used to test and start it off.

I ran out of peg boards pretty quick, but fortunately, the local Joann’s had a sale going, so I was able to get everything I needed. The pattern quickly started to expand, and I was only able to estimate how big it would get.

There were way more of some colors than others. Almost twice as many greys as there were yellows.

I toyed with the idea of having the borders being rough, but shifted to having a solid grey border to frame it.

All the beads that remained were dumped back in the sorting dish, mixed back up, and placed around the border so that I could use all 22k beads.

It’s ready to get taped up at this point. (I later added my signature “D” in the corner.

It is all taped up and holes poked.

Just starting the ironing at this point. I knew it was going to take several hours to complete. I started ironing it like a normal “smaller” piece, but quickly determined that I needed to turn up the heat and get it done quickly.

Here is the first sign that things are going wrong.

As the tape and the beads started heating up, there was expansion and warping. I tried to keep heavy books on these parts as I was ironing, but they kept popping up.

The parchment paper usually stays flat on the beads when ironing, but this clearly wasn’t going to be the case for this one.

After the principle ironing, you can see how the masking tape wrinkles and pulls on the beads. With small scale stuff, this isn’t an issue.

The tape came off easily enough. Most of it was in one big ball.

Here are a few spots that came out ugly as it warped. From a distance, it’s not bad, but as an artist, I am hypercritical of my own work.

This whole project was quite the undertaking, but I knew the first time would be a challenge, and I would learn a lot from it. I plan on making at least 3 more big Perler bead pieces like this in the future, with different designs, and I am confident they will turn out much better.

I had a goal to finish it before the end of the year, and have accomplished that goal. Tomorrow I will start photographing it and getting the pictures posted online. I don’t even know how many hours I’ve put into it, but it’s been over a year in the making.

The sign of a busy Perler artist, is a messy kitchen table. I was making some Battletoads, and was taping the surprised toad beadsprite in a hurry and totally ripped his arms and legs off. I have since rebuilt him, but the pic just looks funny like he is in pain and shock. =)

Note the completely full 22k container of black beads. That is the 3rd time I have had to fill it since I started last July. I just got an $80 in to help finish the Final Fantasy stuff. The shark there is the Grey Shark from FF1.

I have been making Perler bead art for about 8 months now, and in that span have made about 250 individual pieces of bead-art. I like to make these tutorial videos almost as much as making the beadsprites themselves.

I loved the Ren and Stimpy cartoons and games back in the 90’s. This beadsprite I made was inspired from “The Ren and Stimpy Show: Time Warp” for the SNES.